Why Your UX Designer Won’t Be the Next Steve Jobs

Your UX designer won’t be the next Steve Jobs. You might be wondering why I would say this. After all, UX designers devote their lives to improving and perfecting the user experience, spending countless hours exploring, anticipating and advocating for users’ needs in everything from product design to web usability. Most would argue that Jobs’ fanatical focus on design quality played a pivotal role in the success of the Apple products he championed.

The thing is, Jobs didn’t just understand UX. What made Jobs great was his ability to communicate the benefits of his design decisions to key stakeholders and consumers, ultimately fueling exponential growth for Apple and unprecedented heights of brand loyalty (not to mention financial success for a brand that, at one point, some deemed “dead.”)

The bottom line is this: A designer’s ability to understand and communicate business objectives can have a greater impact on a project’s success or failure than their UX chops!

As one participant put it:My biggest challenge is finding designers who are comfortable at the intersection of business and design. It's true, solid design skills, prototyping, complex application design experience, good personality fit are all hard to find, too. However, what I find is that designers struggle most with the idea of designing a product to meet a set of business needs. They also often don't have the experience of facilitating the conversation with business partners around the intersection of product/business requirements and user experience requirements.

Another participant articulated the problem this way:Forget about mobile, agile, responsive Web, etc. It's still hard to find really solid designers, period. By solid designers I mean those that are true creative problem solvers. I still come across many who are more artists than designers, some who are more technology oriented, and some who are more production than anything else. Few designers I come across possess the ability to understand and articulate the strategic business objectives and primary user needs, and have the ability to create elegant design solutions that solve for both.

In other words, if your UX designer is not the next Steve Jobs, it’s not because he or she is a poor UX designer or lacks technical skills. It’s because he or she is either unable to communicate effectively with business leaders or to clearly articulate the business case for strong UX.

So what can be done about this?Emphasize the Business of Design

While graphic and web design are often evaluated on aesthetic lines, the fact of the matter is that design serves business needs. For this reason, leading design organizations, thought leaders, and educators emphasize the need for designers to think like business people. As design becomes more complicated, technical, and user-focused, the need to design for business results only increases. The more designers, UX or otherwise, can internalize the goals of the business, the more “Steve Jobs-like" they will become.

Offer Business Mentorship to Designers

To be fair, UX designers are not often hired to achieve business results. They are hired to solve specific technical issues or usability problems. However, once they become part of an organization, whatever their specific focus, it should be the role and responsibility of their manager or director to consistently put their work into a business context. In this way, UX specialists can become more accustomed to thinking about the problems they are solving as business problems, first and foremost. They should also be invited to provide a UX perspective on other business challenges faced by the organization.

Encourage Business Leaders to Understand Design Fundamentals

Achieving a proper balance of design and business acumen requires a bit of give and take. UX designers need to become more business savvy, but business leaders also need to become more design savvy. Instead of viewing design as nice-to-have window dressing on whatever the company “really does,” business leaders need to view design as an essential part of the service that the company provides to its customers. Indeed, as more companies become aware of the need to manage and improve the overall customer experience, they will also come to see the inherent value of focusing on the user’s experience of their products and websites.

Crossing the chasm that often separates design thinking from business thinking is the challenge facing many in the UX field. Until that chasm is crossed, it is unlikely that this field will produce the next Steve Jobs.

Once someone does cross the chasm, watch out!

Have you experienced this in your business or UX career? What other recommendations would you offer to UX professionals to help them bridge the gap between design, business and communication skills?